Why would this trifle be newsworthy?
I tell you why: because nowadays it's one of the very few ways you can actually OWN your music.
I used to consider vinyl some hipster madness fad. I don't buy the "sounds warmer" BS, and it's definitely worse than digital in every possible aspects. Except: you OWN it. No DRM. No need of some license-encumbered codec to play it. No need of careful backup, and shielding your backup from solar flares. No need to setup an account, or to play a premium to skip annoying ads. Also, it's undoubtedly more elegant in a home setting, if you are the kind of person who cares about this. Quality- and durability-wise it's way better than audiocassette (although the latter is WAY cooler, vaporwave-wise!).
Notice: I am still not owning vinyl, I play MP3s on Winamp. But I started seeing why someone might consider it a valid alternative. Although I'm not sure market sales are indicative of more awareness in digital self-sovereignty rather than just "lifestyle trends".
[...] the concept of "quantum supremacy" is a bit underwhelming. You only need to prove that exists: *one* instance size for *one* specific problem that has *no* practical use (and that is specialized for *your* device) in order to claim "supremacy" for your device. And [Richard Borcherds] is totally right on this (but, as I just wrote, he went too far with his argument and did not account for programmability, which makes all the difference.) To which I answer with two observations.
The first is that, for quantum "skeptics" in the community (such as Gil Kalai for example), even this lame definition of quantum supremacy should not be attainable! Skeptics have to understand that denying the feasibility of quantum supremacy is a very difficult task, exactly because the definition is so underwhelming! If you are a non-believer in quantum supremacy, then not only you claim that quantum computers will never have an edge over classical computers for practical problems, but you are claiming that, no matter what the problem and instance size at hand, classical will always be better or roughly on par with quantum in performance. So, think twice before taking this stance. I am looking at you, uneducated Dunning-Kruger commenter on Slashdot.
My second observation is that in my opinion all these misunderstandings are due to the unfortunate choice of the word "quantum supremacy", because it gives false expectations to the non-expert audience.
So, in other words, the definition of "quantum supremacy" is strong, but not as silly as you might expect, it's not "able to simulate itself" but something more. 70 qubits will not allow you to break RSA, but you can still do probably-not-useful computational tasks that are likely out of reach for any non-quantum computer. "Useful" tasks will begin in the realm of chemistry and material science, from what I've heard from colleagues at around 100-110 non-corrected (physical) qubits.
It is a VoLTE / WiFi calling vulnerability: https://googleprojectzero.blog...
Until security updates are available, users who wish to protect themselves from the baseband remote code execution vulnerabilities in Samsung’s Exynos chipsets can turn off Wi-Fi calling and Voice-over-LTE (VoLTE) in their device settings. Turning off these settings will remove the exploitation risk of these vulnerabilities.
the allocation pattern isn't an even distribution because it is skewed by the improper algorithm "fast-forwarding" on the allocations to the hidden volume. This pattern remains when the hidden volume isn't decrypted and can hint at its existence.
Ah, I see what you mean, like in a modulo bias. You're not wrong: it is improper to say that the distribution of allocated slices is uniformly random. However, this is not a problem, because the scenario is different from a modulo bias: here, the "skewed" distribution is the same whether you have other hidden volumes or not. Let's take an example: say you have 3 volumes total but you only give the password for the 1st one, so there is other 2 hidden. What the adversary sees is slices allocated to avoid what look like "random holes". More concretely, say you see slices allocated at position 3200, 3201 and 3202. This is fishy, because either you have been very, very unlucky, or there is a large gap of occupied but hidden slices before position 3200. But you would see similar gaps even if you unlock all 3 volumes, because the more consecutive slices you allocate, the higher is the probability that the next one is going to be consecutive as well! You find some statistical analysis in the thesis but the bottom line is: true, there is some statistical deviation, but negligible.
"Ada is PL/I trying to be Smalltalk. -- Codoso diBlini
